House price expectations, mortgages, and subjective well‐being in urban China

This study aims at investigating the roles of house price expectations and mortgages in urban dwellers' subjective well‐being (SWB) in China. Using 3,717 urban householder respondents collected in the 2011 China Household Finance Survey and categorizing the sample into three subsamples: homeowners without and with a home loan, and nonhomeowners, the ordered logit models of the ordinal‐dependent variable SWB with and without considering the endogeneity problem are estimated using these three subsamples separately. The primary finding is that house price expectations have a negative influence on the likelihood of having a better SWB only for homeowners without a home loan. However, more houses can mitigate this negative influence. For homeowners with a home loan, mortgages have a negative impact on the likelihood of having a better SWB. Finally, the Beijing sample based on the 2017 data also supports the influences of house price expectations and mortgages on SWB.